List The Direct References of Stereolab

You're talking about the bass line to "Metronomic Underground," I take it?
Yup, that's what I'm talking about, jaymc.

Milton I can't believe you didn't post this -

http://files.myopera.com/E.%20Driver/albums/35120/JohnCage.jpg

xxpost Milton

Hmm... yes. "Living fantasy of the immortal"

thanks!

I've actually only read it in Spanish. Going to buy this version you recommend!

Gastr del Sol opened for Stereolab at the Metro in Chicago back in the mid-90s, and a couple weeks before the show I bumped into David Grubbs at the Hyde Park Kinko's on 57th St. He showed me the gig flyer he was printing up which read "Stereolab - 'John Cage Bubblegum' / Gastr del Sol - 'Steve Reich n Roll'"

I didn't actually go that show tho. Dumb! I never saw Stereolab.

I HAVE THAT FIRST RECORD!

it's been so long, but they ripped the bassline for a song directly from a yoko ono tune from her first or second solo album

http://www.zenker.se/Books/the_stars_my_destination.jpg

http://www.see.com.au/blog/archives/Darren%20002.jpg

Prokofiev's Symphonie Diabolique:
http://website.lineone.net/~dmitrismirnov/image020.jpg

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/51It1cvE6cL._SS500_.jpg

if it is a reference it's admittedly not a very direct one (though I'm sure they've read it) -- with those lines about 'war', probably something else made the song's orbit as well

This is the future of an illusion
Aggressive culture of despotism
Living fantasy of the immortal
The reality of an animal

One of their tracks is based on "Disco Rough" by Mathématiques Modernes.

Can't think of anything less obvious right now (I thought I was a genius for spotting the 100 Years of Solitude thing once and then googled it and nabisco had already written about it on Pitchfork, thus I lose), but "Enivrez-Vous!" from Peng! takes its lyrics from a Baudelaire prose-poem.

I'd always wondered about some of these! Thanks.

Maybe someone knows what that French Disco line really is: Bubble Withdrawal?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_Pamela

I have her CD somewhere, it is bats!

a lot of that youtube series of comparisons are a little on the vague side, but they're fun

I would not have compared 'Emperor Tomato Ketchup' to 'Why?' by the Plastic Ono Band, I'd have used "Les Histoires D'A" by Les Rita Mitsouko

Stereolab guilty: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML9PWVm0wEQ

& I will post these anyway

Sylvie Vartan - Cette lettre-là (1965)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOlx2MxC6eQ

Sylvie Vartan - Par amour par pitié (1966)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3uL8M0svSQ

Sylvie Vartan - Irresistiblement
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZCbwg6VmnI

Pack Yr. Romantic Mind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataille

http://www.bigoven.com/uploads/margarine.jpg

that was feeble, sorry

brilliant thread, that Jirí Trnka film is mindblowing. good work!

has anyone mentioned family fodder yet?, as a general influence and specifically savoire faire and it's uncanny resemblance to (i think) wow and flutter. was it milton who mentioned upstairs somewhere that sterolab steals seem a bit disingenuous? i dunno if i could go along with that, their references generally seem pretty overt, if obscure. i think it's pretty key to the appeal of stereolab that you just know everything is pilfered.

Yet nothing sounds quite like Stereolab. Sort of like a robot made of all sorts.

holy shit this thread. overwhelming amount of info. more pls!

What Charlie No4 said above.

thanks, people

"All good things to come.."

MBV,Spacemen 3, Astrud Gilberto, Nico, Francoise Hardy.

"Pause" samples the "Swedish Rhapsody" numbers station transmission.
(Numbers stations transmission consist of transient noise bursts with announcements.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVqaoxxsN7Q
More info:
http://www.simonmason.karoo.net/page30.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station

Wouldn't it be quicker to just list the things that aren't a direct influence on Stereolab?

Like uh........ummmmm........

Corn Flakes

You obviously haven't heard the obscure 1996 comp-only track "Kellogg Oberheim Fondle"

i'm not on board with a lot of these, but ...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=IrFdR7I_kjM
http://youtube.com/watch?v=s9N1uwNEraM
http://youtube.com/watch?v=E9iiJy0jWSg
http://youtube.com/watch?v=LNAO-vqa6R0

Does it count that they play this record sometimes before they go on mean it's a reference, or just a somewhat similar sound?

http://perso.orange.fr/vivonzeureux/Images/familysavoir1.jpg

i'm not on board with a lot of these, but ...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=IrFdR7I_kjM
http://youtube.com/watch?v=s9N1uwNEraM
http://youtube.com/watch?v=E9iiJy0jWSg
http://youtube.com/watch?v=LNAO-vqa6R0

-- jaxon, Saturday, 27 October 2007 10:23 (53 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Some of those are either acknowledged influences (Gane has said Flower Call Nowhere is based on Fearless Vampire Killers, which is obvious when you hear the AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH ... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH ... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH ... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH bit) or incredibly tenuous links. Quite a few are disturbingly close though.

http://www.seafriends.org.nz/photolib/shows/snapper.jpg

And from an NZ domain too.

You poopheadz, I posted those just upthread!

The really tenuous ones are the things that seem common to a million songs, too common to count as a "steal" even if they're directly referencing the original -- the Canned Heat one is pretty free-floating in the whole world of music at this point, and the Archies one is like, umm, pretty common rhythm guitar sound.

now i see snapper, sorry.

astrud gilberto - "summer sweet"

listen to the verses and tell me that the organ sound and chord changes aren't like a total mid-era Stereolab sound.

Jon, amazingly comprehensive -- nice work. I will admit I had no idea of the extent to which their music was referential.

Should we start a thread about the 'Lab aesthetic -- ie, what the point of all this is? Because for me, the mind has always been engaged by the sum total of their work -- in particular, the (frankly unprecedented) vigilance of their postmodernism. But the heart, which has to judge Stereolab records on their musical merits, is altogether less convinced.

The whole thing started collapsing under its own weight when they started collaborating with fellow derivative bricoleurs, the High Llamas.

The Lightning Seeds: "Pure"

Pack Yr Romantic Mind from Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements begins with a sample from "Pop Orbite", a song on Chico Magnetic Band's album.

-- oscar, Wednesday, October 24, 2007 11:32 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark Link

actually "Pop Orbite" is sampling the same fragment of that Perrey / Kingsley tune "One Note Samba -- Spanish Flea". thanks for getting me to check out that Chico Magnetic Band album though, it's nuts

The Groop Played "Midnight Cowboy" Music

>Should we start a thread about the 'Lab aesthetic -- ie, what the point of all this is?

I think we all know what the point is, I like their tunes. If they're sometimes a little too wallpapery, the wallpaper suits me -- if I'm going to tune out to something lovely, it's reassuring that when I tune back in I realize the lyrics are about Bataille or Marx instead of guns or money or something poisonous). I like that they leave a trail of crumbs leading to the inspirations, I'm just surprised more people don't investigate them when it's such a blatant aspect of their whole project

Can I just point out that the arrangement of Perrey & Kingsley's One Note Samba/Spanish Flea medley is surely based on the Sergio Mendez medley of the same two songs which was released the previous year. All the changes take place at identical points in the songs, the tempo is almost identical also. It's like they used it as a template. I realize that this has nothing to do with Stereolab though I'm sure they must have at some point betrayed a Sergio Mendez influence.

This thread is why I've never liked Stereolab and have never tried very hard to

I think we all know what the point is, I like their tunes. If they're sometimes a little too wallpapery, the wallpaper suits me -- if I'm going to tune out to something lovely, it's reassuring that when I tune back in I realize the lyrics are about Bataille or Marx instead of guns or money or something poisonous). I like that they leave a trail of crumbs leading to the inspirations, I'm just surprised more people don't investigate them when it's such a blatant aspect of their whole project

See, Jon, I actually wasn't be snide about asking what the "point" of them is -- reading this thread, for the first time I began to think that maybe I was missing something about Stereolab's referentiality. I honestly used to think, "These guys are the lowest form of hero worship" -- Neu, Serge Gainsbourg, etc. It never seemed to rise above the materials they were pilfering.

But what you've laid out above is much, MUCH more obsessive than that -- more than I ever realized and definitely more than mere hero worship. It's almost as if Stereolab intentionally went into this thinking that they were going to be analog plunderphonics, creating their work exclusively out of the songs and aesthetics of others' to the exclusion of any original material whatsoever.

And I think that's absolutely fascinating -- a word I never would have associated with Stereolab in my life.

Primal Scream for hipsters

Because Primal Scream are for the masses, maaaaan

The idea that they're somehow insane plunderers is getting WAY overblown on this thread, for a lot of reasons:

(a) the stuff up at the top of the thread consists of the same kind of iconographic / non-musical references most every band takes up in the service of creating an image/aesthetic

(b) the number of direct musical borrowings may not be as high as this thread makes it seem, considering that this band has released approximately 18,000,000 songs

(c) the only reason those borrowings get tagged as somehow significant is precisely because they were borrowing from sources that were (at the time) somewhat arcane -- a rock band that borrows just as much from obvious sources like the Kinks or Clash or Gang of Four or whatever is not considered to be plundering, mostly because they're interpreted as following in a common tradition, and not trying to get credit for those sources; it's not necessarily a safe bet that anything different is going on with Stereolab

(d) it's somewhat off to act as if these borrowings were somehow discrete: one of the best things about their middle period was the way a lot of their influences just went bubbling around in an amalgam that could seem to be referencing, say, K Komeda and Neu! and Jobim and Francoise Hardy in equal parts and at the same time